As part of the cloud-native community, we understand the value of sharing knowledge and facilitating learning. Our “Write For Us” program is an opportunity for you to share your insights with our audience while being duly credited and compensated for your effort.

What to write about

You can write about almost anything that helps people in their cloud native journey. This can include a variety of content, such as tutorials, how-to guides, in-depth documentation, and comprehensive overviews. While not limited to, popular subjects often revolve around Kubernetes, container technology, storage solutions (including databases), machine learning, and networking.

In particular, our audience has shown a keen interest in detailed walkthroughs and tutorials on emerging Kubernetes tools and applications. However, we don't restrict our platform to these areas exclusively. We value your unique perspectives and ideas, so feel free to propose new topics or formats.

Upon submitting your tutorial, it will be reviewed by our team of editors. To improve the clarity and overall quality of our content, we may suggest necessary modifications before publishing it on our site. When your work is published, we will duly credit you using your name and Twitter handle (provided these details are included in your profile).

To ensure your work reaches a wider audience, we will promote all published guides on our social media channels and community feeds. You’ll find more on the editorial process below.

Original content only

We accept original content only. We cannot accept or issue payments for content that has been, in whole or in part:

  • Copied and pasted from elsewhere online - including sites such as ChatGPT
  • Spun or paraphrased from content online
  • Content translated from other languages to English

We use both plagiarism and AI checkers along with our own research to detect content that is not unique and original.

Content created for the “Write for Civo” program, in all stages of development, will remain the sole and exclusive property of Civo at all times. Civo may make alterations and edits to the content at any time. Civo reserves the right to remove content at any time.

We encourage sharing and promotion of the content to expand its reach and make the knowledge more accessible. However, please note that direct republication of the content elsewhere, in part or in whole, without explicit written consent from Civo, is not allowed. You are permitted to link directly to the content on our site as a reference or to share it with others, but the content itself may not be re-published or re-distributed elsewhere.

Submitting your content idea

Before creating your tutorial, you will need to send us your idea along with the requested information via the form at write@civo.com. We will then contact you via email to let you know if your idea has been accepted, and you can begin writing your first draft.

Submit your content idea

When submitting your content idea, you will be asked to provide the following information:

  • Full Name
  • Email Address
  • About you
  • The title of your proposed tutorial / guide
  • Examples (URLs) of your previous published work
  • Outline / abstract with section headings of your proposed tutorial / guide

Ensure you include enough information for our editorial team to understand what your tutorial will include and how it will be relevant to Civo users.

Writing a tutorial

Once someone from our team has contacted you about your idea being submitted, you will be able to begin writing your first draft. Please note that all drafts should be submitted as a Google Doc file. This will allow our team to edit your submission and leave any comments directly on the piece.

Formatting your tutorial

When creating your tutorial, you’ll need to use HTML formatting and include a title along with a snippet.

The 'snippet' will not appear in the tutorial itself, but is a short description of the tutorial provided to users on certain pages and on social media links. The snippet is the text under the title in the image here, for example:

Adding a snippet for civo write for us

It is crucial that you break your content up with headings (H2, H3, and H4) to make it more readable - these headings will also appear on the left-hand index for your tutorial.

Do not use H1 headings - these are reserved for the main title of your tutorial (the title field).

When considering the title, think of what would make you want to read it. Include all the relevant keywords to attract a reader's attention.

We recommend including the following headings for the vast majority of tutorials:

  • Introduction
  • Prerequisites
  • Conclusion

Example tutorials

Please see the following examples of ideally formatted guides to adhere to.

Including images and screenshots

Images and screenshots are crucial both for improving the comprehension of your content and breaking up long-winded explanations and walkthroughs. An example of how images can be used within a tutorial is to demonstrate what the users' screen will look like once they have completed a step:

Example of image for Civo write for us

You will be asked to send any images used in the tutorial across to the Civo editorial team in a separate file so that they can be uploaded alongside your published tutorial.

Hosting of code

If the guide you are writing requires code to be used and if that code is too long to be displayed as part of the document itself, you can link to an externally-hosted repository when needed. Civo may opt to make a fork of this repository and store it as part of the main Civo organisational repository on GitHub to make sure it remains available.

Any code you reference for use in tutorials should be licensed to be freely used as such.

Length and word count

A guide should be as long as it needs to be - no shorter, no longer. The goal is to write purposefully and concisely, without any unnecessary musings or repeat explanations.

We do not pay for content by the word, but rather by how involved the technical writing process is, and the effort required. The fee will be at the editor's discretion. Find out more about payments in the payout structure section of this document.

Editorial process

Once your guide is written, we recommend you run it through a spelling and grammar checker to root out any typographical errors.

When you’re happy that your tutorial is complete and at the required standard, you can send the shared Google Docs link to our editorial team. Any significant changes required will be communicated to you, and we will work together to get the best version of the tutorial out.

Timeframe for editorial process

It will typically take our editorial team up to 2 weeks to review your submission. This timeframe may vary depending on the complexity of your piece and the amount of technical input required from others in the team.

Any changes/comments that our team have will be made in the shared Google Doc file and a contact from our team will also keep you updated regularly via email.

Publication

We reserve the right to change the content before publication as an official tutorial. Please be aware that you give us an irrevocable license to use the content, amending it as we see fit (for example, for breaking version changes).

Once we're happy with how the tutorial reads, a Civo editor will publish the content for general consumption. We will then begin to promote the published tutorial on our social media channels and community feeds.

Getting paid

Your fee will be paid via PayPal only or in Civo credit. We cannot offer any other means of payment. There are no exceptions.

The price we pay per tutorial is entirely at the discretion of the Civo editorial team. This fee will be agreed upon the initial acceptance of your idea. If the final piece submitted does not meet our quality guidelines, the editorial team can retract the provisional price given.

As mentioned earlier in this documentation, a guide should be as long as it needs to be - no shorter, no longer. The goal is to write purposefully and concisely, without any unnecessary musings or repeat explanations. Your content will be rejected if it is suspected of containing superfluous passages and repetition to bump up the word count.

Once a fee is agreed upon and your content is ready to be published, we will aim to pay you within 4 weeks. More often than not, we will complete payments within 7 days.

Payments for edits

We also offer payment for edits on out-of-date content. Fees are dependent on the work required and are entirely down to the Civo editorial team. If you are interested in editing and updating an existing tutorial, please submit a form at write@civo.com.

Historical content

We can not offer payment for content that was created before the “Write for Civo” program began. Likewise, we can not offer payment for any content published that was not an “agreed topic” confirmed by a Civo content editor.

Rejection and resubmission

Submissions can be rejected for a range of reasons such as:

  • No relevance towards Civo or its users
  • Content already exists on the Civo site
  • It is not a topic we are looking to publish content on

If your submission has been rejected, you are still able to submit more submissions at write@civo.com.

Commercial / OSS tutorials

Please note that we do not pay for tutorials if the author represents a commercial tool, application, or an open source project.

This would be considered a co-marketing activity, in which case we would love to connect and discuss how we can work together. Contact us at marketing@civo.com.